


Running Back to You

by anchoredinthestars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 03:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2907035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anchoredinthestars/pseuds/anchoredinthestars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post 2x10. Inhuman!Skye.</p>
<p>Skye finally gets to find out what she becomes.</p>
<p>(and all roads lead back to him)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Running Back to You

She doesn’t remember much of the before—only panic and ‘No!’ and slowly being enclosed from all sides until all that is left is darkness.

When she emerges, all that fear is gone. She feels…reborn—a new sort of energy surging through her veins. It’s life and vitality like she’s never experienced before, and she can’t help but feel like the world is at her feet, hers for the taking.

A lifetime of not knowing who she was or where she came from, and now all that seems to matter is that she knows exactly who she is and where she’s supposed to go from here.

But then the first thing she sees is Trip crumbling to pieces, and all her mind can do is zero in on something Raina had said only moments before: “We finally get to find out what we become.”

It is only then that she registers the fallen rocks all around her, still dancing in beat with the trembling of her own fingers, and the horrified expressions on Coulson’s and Mack’s faces as they skid into the room, eyes almost accusatory.

_This is your fault._

Is this what she’s become now?

***

Briefly, a part of her had wondered if they’d stick her in the same cell Ward had been imprisoned in back at base, but when weeks pass and they remain airborne—save for a few ground expeditions by May, Lance, and Bobbi—she realizes that she already is in her makeshift cell. Away from actual, tangible earth, she is, naturally, that much less of a threat.

Of course, that doesn’t exactly stop Fitzsimmons from running every test imaginable on her. She wonders what they’re looking to find; she never sticks around long enough to know.

She can see the way they look at her now, the way everyone in the team looks at her now. Like she’s a broken toy that needs fixing.

She doesn’t know what it means that she doesn’t feel broken. She doesn’t know how to tell them.

***

It’s the same dream, every night.

She’s never sure where she is, at first. But as soon as she steps out from the narrow hallway onto the uppermost deck, she realizes that she’s on a ship.

She has no idea what she’s doing there, but her feet carry her on ahead with absolute purpose. They don’t stop until she is against the railing, propping up a sniper rifle she hadn’t even known she was carrying.

On the deck below, she sees Simmons and the boy named Donnie, and all she can think of is that he’s dangerous. A threat to be neutralized.

Because in a world of Us or Them, those are the rules that she has learned to live by.

So she pulls the trigger, easily, mechanically, with a consistent sixty-one beats per minute.

Then, she wakes up.

She wakes up and all she can think about is that she calls to the earth the same way he once called to ice.

She wakes up and all she can do is wonder how long it’ll be before she’s on the other end of the trigger.

***

The answer comes soon enough the day she wakes to an announcement about an engine malfunction. Of course, because all her worst nightmares are becoming a reality, it’s the kind that would require landing for a couple hours to get repaired.

There’s a part of her that thrums with absolute excitement at the news—she’ll get to feel that…same wholeness she felt the day everything changed—but the rest of her? The rest of her is all fear. Because even she doesn’t know the extent of what she has become…and what if it ends up costing her everyone she loves?

It’s not long before May instructs them to prepare for landing and she has to leave the safe confines of her pod to get buckled in. She’s careful to avoid meeting anyone’s eyes, because she’s nervous enough as it is and she’s not sure if she’d be able to handle what she might find if she looks back.

For now though, she is okay.

She is sixty one beats per minute, and she is okay.

But the closer they get to the ground, the more her control begins to shatter. Suddenly, her head is filled with images of Trip, turned to stone and disintegrating to pieces right before her eyes—all because he came to save her. She thinks of Donnie Gill, the first boy she ever killed, the boy who would never have been caught in the crossfire if he hadn’t been a Gifted. Then, she thinks of her mother, of the people in the village and the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who died trying to keep her alive. She has so, so much blood on her hands…

“Skye?” Jemma whispers from beside her.

She doesn’t open her eyes, but she can feel in every cell in her body that they are on solid ground and oh god, oh god what does she do now…

“Guys, her heart rate’s reading 250!”

She can’t stop shaking she can’t stop shaking she can’t stop shaking

“Well, what do we do?”

“Grab the device!”

Jemma again. “Y-you know we can’t—”

“We don’t have a choice.” Fitz.

“But it’s _Skye_!”

Finally, she tears her eyes open, and she realizes that it wasn’t so much that she was shaking as much as she was creating an earthquake. The Bus is in ruins, the vibrations strong enough to have brought everything in the vicinity crashing down. The horror of the sight is enough to bring her—and the ground beneath them—to a standstill.

But it’s too late.

Because Simmons has a gash on her temple that won’t stop bleeding, and every ICER in the room is trained on her with absolute precision.

But it’s Fitz that really breaks her heart, because Fitz is holding a different sort of weapon. And that’s when it dawns on her that they weren’t running all those tests for research, of course not—they were running all those tests to create a device that would be able to stop her, if it came down to it. If it came down to now.

There’s a hardened look in his eyes, conviction in the way he’s holding the weapon, and she knows that he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her. She knows because she wouldn’t. Because she didn’t.

And she can’t blame him, really, because Fitz has lost so much from choosing to believe in the good in people andwhyshouldshebetheexceptionanyways?

She might not have been broken all those weeks ago, but she sure feels broken now.

***

What happens next is something of a blur.

All she knew was that she had to run, run fast and far, far away from there. She doesn’t even know how she managed to get away, can’t comprehend why they would possibly let her, but the next thing she knows, she’s in her van and driving away from the Bus as fast as she can.

She’s not yet sure how she feels about the fact that their best chance is to be as far away from _her_ as possible.

Maybe this is who she is now: destruction wherever she goes.

But being alone? That’s who she’s always been. Her childhood, after all, was a cycle of finding foster families and not belonging and having to start all over. She’s survived years and years before finding a family in Coulson’s team—she should be able to do it again.

What worries her though is that, this time, she’s not so sure she can.

***

She drives for weeks, never stopping too long at one place, and doing everything she possibly can to keep herself distracted.

Her eyes almost never leave the device wrapped around her wrist, the one that dictates whether she’s in control or not. She hasn’t been at sixty-one since the day she left the Bus, but she takes the ninety—because, hey, at least it isn’t 250.

She tries not to dwell too long on how it takes nearly all of her energy to even keep it that way.

She’s surviving, but only barely, and she knows she needs a better plan than the one she has now if she wants to _keep_ surviving. Needs the help she doesn’t have.

But she has no one else.

Turning to her dad would be a recipe for disaster, and turning to…

…Except he hates her now, right? He should hate her. God, the last time they saw each other she shot him to the ground and left him for dead. And maybe he is dead, once and for all, but something in her tells her he survived—just like he survives everything else.

Maybe that’s what gives her hope. After all, she can’t possibly break the boy who’s already been broken.

It’s so stupid to even consider it, so stupid, but she doesn’t know where else she has left to go.

She remembers hating him, so much. Remembers the day she told him he should have ran faster. She hated him for making them trust him, for making _her_ trust him. For tainting the things she used to want, like love and trust and someone to hold close. She hated him for the jeopardy he put the team in, for the lives he took, for the way he damaged Fitz…But she almost hated him most for making it so damn hard to hate him, for being so steadfastly honest when everyone else tried to keep her in the dark, because even when he was supposed to be the bad guy, he was still somehow on her side.

And though she’d never admit it, maybe that’s why the thought of him not loving her anymore terrifies her more than she could ever hate him.

Because maybe then, she’ll truly be alone.

***

Finding him, it turns out, is the perfect distraction.

Despite how good she is at what she does, he’s just that much better at what he does—and, as such, he’s made finding him one of the harder things she’s ever had to do. Fortunately for her, she has a lot of time, focus, and energy to redirect.

She just doesn’t want to be alone anymore.

***

It’s dark and it’s pouring, but when she does find him, she drives faster than she ever has in her entire life.

The coordinates take her to a discreet motel in the middle of nowhere, and she’s completely drenched by the time she makes it to his door, but it’s not until her fist is inches away from knocking that she stops in her tracks.

Because this is it. This is the moment she gets to find out if she’s lost him, too. And it’s such a bad idea on so many different levels, but she figures if she walks away now, she might never find him again.

So she knocks.

And just the gravity of what she’s just done is enough to knock all the air from her lungs, to make her turn away. Then, she’s gasping and running her hands panickedly through her hair and, all at once, she can feel just how incredibly _cold_ she is.

What will she even say to him? What _can_ she say to him?

_I’m sorry, so sorry._

_Please don’t hate me._

_I have nowhere else to go._

_I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, too._

She’s so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she doesn’t even hear the slight creak of the door opening, and

“Skye?”

Her back’s still turned to him, but she can almost picture the exact expression on his face, the precise look in his eyes—the one he’s only ever reserved just for her.

Suddenly, it’s all too much and she’s shaking again and everything’s shaking and no no no this can’t be happening. Her eyes flash to her wrist, glowing green, and the numbers keep escalating and she’s just…she’s just so tired. She wants to stop. God, can she stop?

“Skye, are you okay? What’s going on?”

She promised herself she wouldn’t cry—forced herself not to even shed a single tear after what happened on the Bus. But she turns to look at him, finally, and he’s not looking back at her with the fear and uncertainty she had seen in everyone else’s eyes—despite everything that she’s done to him, despite everything that she is now—and, somehow, that’s what does it. She lets the first tear drop, and suddenly, she can feel everything she’s numbed away since the day she followed Raina into the tunnels. The grief, the confusion, the power, the bliss, the rage…and the fear.

She watches him start to panic, unsure of how he should proceed. She wants to laugh at that, because of course: the girl who just shot him is now crying at his doorstep, and really, there can’t possibly be any protocol on that.

But then she remembers what she’s become—the way she can make the earth tremble like she’s doing now—and surely, he must know what’s happened to her.

She’s shaking harder than ever, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders if maybe this is it. Maybe this’ll be the end of her, and she can be free at last.

But then he closes the distance between them and wraps his arms around her, and for once, everything stops shaking.

There’s silence and stillness and her and him and _everything stops shaking_.

“It’ll be okay, Skye. Whatever it is, it’ll be okay. I promise.”

And just like always, she believes him.

 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! x
> 
> originally posted [here](http://anchoredinthestars.tumblr.com/post/106452561229/running-back-to-you)


End file.
